May 31, 2016

April 25, 2016

A bit of the exotic in the Lytro Cinema camera. The thing will rent for a large sum. Traditionally new techniques take some time for experience to build. This may well be a view of the future, but history suggests it will be some time before uses acquire the experience necessary to use it artistically.

September 06, 2015

The beautiful work of Marco Lorenzi who runs a small digital observatory remotely in the Australian outback. Very precise tracking, long multiple exposures with color filters and large CCD array and often tiling images to obtain detail large objects, his results are about as good as amateurs get.

Spend a bit of time and look through his site. I'm particularly taken with his nebula work

August 23, 2015

From the bird’s-­eye perspective, it may not look as though all that much has changed in terms of the livelihoods of the creative class. On the whole, creators seem to be making slightly more money, while growing in number at a steady but not fast pace. I suspect the profound change lies at the boundaries of professionalism. It has never been easier to start making money from creative work, for your passion to undertake that critical leap from pure hobby to part-time income source. Write a novel or record an album, and you can get it online and available for purchase right away, without persuading an editor or an A&R executive that your work is commercially viable. From the consumer’s perspective, blurring the boundaries has an obvious benefit: It widens the pool of potential talent. But it also has an important social merit. Widening the pool means that more people are earning income by doing what they love.

These new careers — collaborating on an indie-­movie soundtrack with a musician across the Atlantic, uploading a music video to YouTube that you shot yourself on a smartphone — require a kind of entrepreneurial energy that some creators may lack. The new environment may well select for artists who are particularly adept at inventing new career paths rather than single-­mindedly focusing on their craft. There are certainly pockets of the creative world, like those critically acclaimed books dropping off the mainstream best-­seller lists, where the story is discouraging. And even the positive trends shouldn’t be interpreted as a mindless defense of the status quo. Most full-time artists barely make enough money to pay the bills, and so if we have levers to pull that will send more income their way — whether these take the form of government grants, Kickstarter campaigns or higher fees for the music we stream — by all means we should pull those levers.

But just because creative workers deserve to make more money, it doesn’t mean that the economic or technological trends are undermining their livelihoods. If anything, the trends are making creative livelihoods more achievable. Contrary to Lars Ulrich’s fear in 2000, the ‘‘diverse voices of the artists’’ are still with us, and they seem to be multiplying. The song remains the same, and there are more of us singing it for a living.

Steven Johnson’s article “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” frames itself as a data-driven response to concerns about the plight of creative workers in the digital age. But Johnson’s grasp of the limitations of the data he cites seems tenuous, and he ends up relying on some very dubious and all-too-familiar assumptions. In its sweeping dismissal of artists’ various concerns, the article reads as an exercise in gaslighting.

This is extra disheartening, because in our previous experiences with the NYT’s journalists and fact-checkers, we’ve found them to be rigorous and fair. Likewise, we’ve found Johnson’s books and TV work to be entertaining and often insightful.

We’ll focus our criticisms on Johnson’s thoughts about musicians in this piece, but it’s worth noting that friends in other creative industries—film and publishing—have also reached out to us noting similar objections about Johnson’s coverage of their fields.

August 05, 2015

The Deep Space Climate Observatory sits at the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and Sun about a million miles from Earth. Far enough away that you see the full disk of the Earth. Taking advantage of that, the satellite carries a four megapixel CCD camera pointed at the Earth.

Here the Moon crosses in front of the Earth - of course you're seeing the back side of the Moon. How cool is that?

July 30, 2015

At the core of the ME20F-SH is a 2.26 megapixel CMOS sensor, originally announced in 2013, which has pixels measuring 19μm - 5.5X larger than what's found on high-end DSLRs. This allows for 1080/60p/30p/24p (and PAL equivalent) video capture in light levels as low as 0.0005 lux at a maximum gain setting of 75 Db, which is equivalent to over ISO 4,000,000. As with the company's professional cinema cameras, Canon Log and Wide DR modes are available for capturing a wide dynamic range.